Clang To Become The Default FreeBSD Compiler Soon

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clang To Become The Default FreeBSD Compiler Soon

The GCC to LLVM/Clang transition as the default FreeBSD compiler is set to happen on 4 November...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE4NDQ

[CTown]

After thinking about it, Clang might be very useful for FreeBSD. Wasn't Arch's PKGBUILD and Gentoo's Ebuild build systems modeled after the BSD "ports system". So, I guess compiling quicker might be a feature for its users (unless I got the concept of the "ports system" completely wrong...).

[soupbowl]

You might be right!

[chilek]

CLANG generated code is much slower than GCC.

Unfortunately we will have even much slower system than it was so far :P

[bulletxt]

Unfortunately we will have even much slower system than it was so far :P

Who cares. Their goal was to not depend on GPL code and it seems they're almost there. Performance is something you can work on, license no. There are companies behind this FreeBSD move.

[jacob]

Unfortunately we will have even much slower system than it was so far :P

I believe that Clang can generate faster code than the GCC 4.2 series that FreeBSD has used so far so no, it won't result in a slower system, it will be a system that runs somewhat faster, builds much faster and has much better build diagnostics. I don't know if FreeBSD can be built with the latest GCC 4.7+ but if it can, you can always use that if you are after speed.

[Awesomeness]

Unfortunately we will have even much slower system than it was so far :P

How much slower is a Clang-compiled OpenOffice compared to a GCC-compiled OpenOffice when opening a 30 pages long document?